David Lynch: ‘I’ve always loved Laura Palmer’

David Lynch: ‘I’ve always loved Laura Palmer’

Twin Peaks terrified TV audiences and made David Lynch a household name. Now, nearly 25 years later, he is returning to the scene of the crime, releasing unseen material from the movie prequel Fire Walk With Me

If you follow David Lynch into the woods he will not hold your hand. He cannot guarantee you will find your way home. He truly hopes that you’ll emerge unscathed.

The director, painter and transcendental meditation disciple has never been one to explain his work and, on the occasion of the release of the Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery box set, no measure of nostalgia will sway him.

He’s sitting on a chaise longue in a hotel suite not far from his Los Angeles home when we meet, exuding charisma and an egoless confidence. At 68, Lynch looks vital, present. He’s dressed in his usual uniform: dark jacket, white shirt buttoned up, a blaze of rockabilly hair atop his weatherbeaten face.

“Wanna take a look?” he says, nasal, deliberate. A Blu-ray box set is on the table, containing Twin Peaks seasons one and two, Fire Walk With Me and – here’s the real prize – a previously unreleased 90 minutes of deleted and extended scenes from the movie.

David Lynch: 'If someone wanted to remake Eraserhead, I might shoot them. If I had a gun.' Photograph: East News/REX

A chuckle dissolves into the smoker’s prelude to a wheeze, and we dive in. The movie Fire Walk With Me, which takes place before the events of the cult TV show Twin Peaks, came out in 1992. Why has it taken so long to release The Missing Pieces?

“It’s been a long story,” he says, sitting up. “People these days kind of know what’s going on because of the internet so they knew certain scenes were not in the film and they wanted to see those scenes, so I kind of liked the idea of scenes on their own.”

Negotiations with the rights holders took seven years, maybe eight, he says. “It was great going back into the world and cutting the scenes together and mixing them and living with the people again.”

Hopefully fans will find it was worth the 22-year wait. The scenes are too fragmented to be viewed as anything other than a cluster of vignettes, but that does not diminish their eccentric power. There’s a droll fight involving Special Agent Chester Desmond and Deer Meadow’s Sheriff Cable; a harrowing sequence with David Bowie’s tormented Phillip Jeffries; an anomaly in which the soon-to-be-murdered homecoming queen Laura Palmer and her parents guffaw over a dinnertime joke; and a poignant, if slightly cloying, glimmer of prescience from Dr Will Hayward.

Lynch always intended to revisit Laura Palmer’s world in movie form. After the US network ABC pulled the plug on Twin Peaks at the end of the second season in June 1991, he told himself he would do just that once he had completed work on Wild at Heart. “I always loved Laura Palmer,” he says, “and in the series she’s dead, so I loved the idea of seeing the last week of her life.”

Fire Walk With Me received a critical and commercial drubbing when it opened in 1992, following the world premiere at Cannes. “There were very bad reviews. I was under a bad cloud during that time and it just didn’t go well.” He pauses briefly. This may be a reference to his 1991 breakup with then-girlfriend Isabella Rossellini.“But I loved the film and when you do something you believe in and it doesn’t go well it’s OK. If you sell out like I did on Dune and it doesn’t go well then you really die.”

Lynch has spoken before of how his experience on Dune was “freeing” and refers to “happy accidents” several times in our conversation. There were plenty of those on Twin Peaks.

TV had never been in Lynch’s sights. In the late 1980s an agent asked Lynch, then with Blue Velvet just behind him, and Hill Street Blues writer Mark Frost, to consider the small screen. Neither man was thrilled. “One day Mark and I went to Du-Par’s [restaurant] on Ventura Boulevard in LA and we just started talking and something started happening and the first thing was ‘a girl’s been murdered’ and that was it.”

Lynch brought in Kyle MacLachlan, who had starred for him in Blue Velvet and the ill-fated Dune, and with the casting nous of Johanna Ray, populated the fictitious Washington state town with an unforgettable cast that included Sheryl Lee, Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, Mädchen Amick, Ray Wise, Joan Chen and Piper Laurie. Lynch also enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti, whose haunting score became a defining feature of the show.

They shot the pilot in Washington state in 1989 and Twin Peaks debuted on 8 April, 1990. Across its eight episodes the show etched its sinister sylvan milieu into the psyche of a generation. It is exactly the kind of quality drama that set the template for current “golden age” of television.

Fourteen months and another season later, Twin Peaks would be over. Lynch had found a new medium to love, but he was being pulled in different directions. “The pilot is the thing for me. Because there were different directors and different writers and we wanted to give them freedom, things drifted a little bit and also I started working on Wild at Heart.

“But just the same, I love the world of Twin Peaks and all the people that live in the world. It’s just that looking back I wish for myself that I had been closer to it.”

Was Twin Peaks a soap parody? “No, no, no, no, no. It is a soap opera. Soap operas grow out of life and because they’re continuing stories you get to go deeper into the characters’ lives ... It just triggers more and more and more – and happy accidents come.”

One not-so-happy, unexpected detour came in the second season when ABC executive Bob Iger, now the chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, decided that Lynch and Frost should reveal the identity of Laura’s killer to appease fans who felt the show was stringing them along.

“It was like we had a little goose that kept laying golden eggs and then we were asked to take that little goose and snip its head off.”

Would he consider creating new Twin Peaks stories?

“In another life, yes.”

How about in this life?

“Like I say, you never say never.”

We get on to the subject of remakes. He says he has no objection to them in principle, although there are limits. What would he say if someone wanted to remake, say, Eraserhead? “If they were near me I might shoot them. If I had a gun.”

I bring up transcendental meditation (TM), which Lynch discovered through his sister in 1973. He has practised it every day of his life since then and has launched the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. TM, he says, informs everything he does. “More happiness in the doing. A lot of negative things lifted away. When you start diving within and infusing that pure consciousness: happiness, intelligence, creativity, energy, peace, love. It’s like gold coming in, garbage going out.”

He talks on the subject for a good five or six minutes, hands oscillating, eyes occasionally closed. Then he stops. “I got on a roll. Sorry.”

Was MacLachlan’s Agent Dale Cooper a poster boy for the meditation technique? “No but he’s bright and shiny and ready-to go and happy; intelligent and intuitive and a problem-solver. So you could say he has a lot of consciousness.”

Lynch is like this and then some. Happily married to fourth wife Emily Stofle (whom he directed in Inland Empire), it seems remarkable that he can visit such darkness in his work. “Well,” says the man who gave us the Black Lodge and had Dennis Hopper play a gas-sucking rapist in Blue Velvet, “here’s the deal. I used to go to well-lit diners, because in a well-lit diner I could sit and think and daydream and I could go to dark places knowing that I could surface in a well-lit, safe place.”

But we want Lynch to show us new dark places, in movies. It’s been nearly a decade since Inland Empire. He says there are no plans yet for a new movie, though, and he is focused on a new painting instead.